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NCAA MEN'S FROZEN FOUR

April 6, 2016

Tampa Bay, Florida

MODERATOR: We're joined by head coach Rand Pecknold and student-athletes Sam Anas and Soren Jonzzon.

COACH PECKNOLD: We want to thank the city of Tampa. It's been a phenomenal experience so far. Got off the plane, had red carpet treatment there, and hotel's been great, the town's been great. So we're looking forward to playing some hockey tomorrow.

MODERATOR: Questions for the student-athletes.

Q. I was asking the BC players the same thing about the factor of the unknown here (indiscernible). How does that factor into your preparation?
SOREN JONZZON: I think it's exciting for us to play a new opponent. We've never played them before. You look at Denver versus North Dakota, I think it's their 275th time playing or something like that. It's kind of funny.

We're excited. We've done extra video on them since we've never played against them versus if we were playing somebody from our own conference because we see them yearly and we know more about their systems and their style of play and things like that. So watch more video and made sure we've gone over their systems in detail.

SAM ANAS: Pretty much going off that, it's exciting to play a team like Boston College, obviously, and we hope we'll have a good showing. But we're focused on them right now, and doing a lot of preparation. Obviously we've never played them. Doing a lot of extra things and getting ready for tomorrow.

Q. I'm just curious, I know your coach has done a lot in terms of staking a culture of success and demanding excellence from you guys. What do you see as your role in establishing that and furthering that tradition?
SAM ANAS: I think a lot of that obviously has come from the coaches, but it's come from past players, and whether it's been three years ago or four years ago, and I think a lot of that has just been driven into us. Mainly off the ice. Incorporating guys into everything. It's not like there's any cliques between the seniors and there's a difference between seniors and freshmen. When we do something, we do it as a team.

When I came in as a freshman, I felt like I was part of the team right away, and it was a very comfortable feeling and it made me get acclimated to the environment much quicker, and it definitely helped on the ice too.

SOREN JONZZON: I definitely agree. I definitely started, like he said, my freshman year, I came in with the seniors and juniors, they really taught us kind of the way things were and showed us the ropes.

And I think now as we're upperclassmen we have pretty much the same role. We've taken the culture that we now hold and pass it on to the freshmen, bring them up the same way we were brought up.

Q. Soren, you were here in 2013. What can you take from that experience? I know you were a freshman, but just what do you remember from it and what were you able to take from that experience in the past three years?
SOREN JONZZON: I mean, playing in the Frozen Four my freshman year was an unbelievable experience. We definitely learned a lot, kind of got to see the red carpet and things like that.

I think the biggest role our seniors have is to really make sure that all the other players are focused on the game rather than all the excitement, whether it be coming off the plane and there's music playing and people greeting us and things like that.

In the end we're here to play a hockey game, and hopefully two hockey games, and we just gotta make sure that everyone's got their focus on that.

Q. When did it really start to click for you guys this is a team that can make this run all the way to Tampa?
SAM ANAS: I think we've had a belief in that the whole year, and obviously we had a great start. And the thing that I think was most important for us, we didn't focus on the big picture. We just focused on what was right ahead of us.

And we took every game one by one, and we didn't really look at really if we were ranked No. 1 or stuff like that. We just focused on playing the best we can play and playing Quinnipiac hockey. We knew if we did that each game, that good results would come our way.

Q. Sam, how are you feeling with an additional two weeks to recover from your injury?
SAM ANAS: Well, I feel great that we're here in Tampa and really excited to get going and excited to get playing tomorrow.

MODERATOR: Thank you. Questions for Coach.

Q. Rand, Jerry spoke at length about the journey he's had to get to this particular stage over and over the last several years and the learning curve he went through. How do you see yourself and infusing the team with a sense about not getting too caught up in the moment and maybe shortening that learning curve for you to get to a win tomorrow and Saturday?
COACH PECKNOLD: Just this season?

Q. Talking about your evolution as a coach over 22 years. You've been to one Frozen Four, this is the second one in a few years, but Jerry has been to quite a few and took a while seemingly to get to where he wants to be. Shortening that learning curve as a coach.
COACH PECKNOLD: I don't think there's any magic trick to shortening your learning curve. I think it's going to happen naturally. There's no question I've evolved as a coach. I think in my early years I had a very fixed mindset. It was very stubborn, didn't use my assistants enough, and then gradually over time got more of an open mindset or growth mindset. There's a good book on that by Carol Dweck about mindsets and how different people think about things.

And I think now I have that open mindset and I'm willing to take a lot of feedback from my assistant coaches. I use Billy and Reid a lot. I think they're great. I think they're two of the best in the business. I think that's a big reason we win. Jared is a great goalie coach. I listen to him a lot. Just try to incorporate a lot of outside ideas.

And I think sometimes coaches get in trouble when they think they're right when they might be wrong. I'm always questioning what I'm doing. I'm still confident with what I do, but, again, I think having that open mindset helped me evolve as a coach.

And we've changed a lot since. 2009 we dramatically changed a lot of the things that we did. On purpose. I made that decision. I thought we'd always been -- the previous five or six years to that, we were always like 18 through 25 in the country, which was great. It was great. Everybody was happy at Quinnipiac to be where we were, coming from Atlantic Hockey and moving to the ECAC.

And I just felt what we did, we were never getting over that hump and be a top 15 team. So I stepped back and asked myself a lot of questions, how can we change, what do we need to do to be better, to be a top 10 or top 15 team. And we did make a lot of changes that summer of '09, and we're reaping the rewards now.

Q. Can you talk about maybe one of those changes?
COACH PECKNOLD: It's not any one thing. I would say one of the main things would be our practice habits. I think in my early years my mindset on a Monday practice was, ah, it's college, they're beat up a little bit. Like Atlantic hockey days, Monday practices weren't that productive. And I let it go. I think a lot of coaches do. I get on them Wednesday and Thursday, I drop the hammer. If you yell all the time, they're not going to listen to you.

And I just made a decision that we weren't going to do it anymore. It wasn't acceptable. In order to do that, I had to get the players to buy into it. There were a couple ways we did it that year to get our guys to buy into that. We had kind of -- I remember bringing a big whiteboard in the room and let's talk about what we need to get better at in the preseason, put everything up on a list. And I kind of guided them a little bit, but one thing was let's be better in practice every day, let's compete every day.

And our practices are awesome. Monday it's awesome. Tuesday it's awesome. Wednesday, Thursday. I think that's why you see so many players within our system evolve, kids that other programs don't want and all of a sudden that kid might be going to NHL. We do a really good job at that. They practice and they get better and improve.

Q. Chase Priskie has played in all but one game and has had a big impact as a freshman. I think tied for second scoring among rookie defensemen. What kind of a learning curve have you learned from him this year, and what would you say maybe he's improved on as the year's gone as far as his skill set and what he brings to the team?
COACH PECKNOLD: Chase had a great year. Probably the smartest thing that he did or we did with him was we had him enroll in the summer and take classes. Once you do that, you have access to our strength coach. He needed to get stronger. So he had four months of that before starting in May until we started in October. And that really helped him. I think it gave him a lot of confidence.

It also integrated him into our culture quicker. So he felt more comfortable. But he's had a great year. The way he plays is how we want our D to play. We want to get our D in the roster, create that second wave, third wave of attack. If there's no opportunity there offensively, they've now created a good gap. They're up in the play, and now the gap's coming back the other way. Chase buys into that. Great for our system. Great hockey player, straight A student, and he's been dominant this year. He's been great.

Q. You grew up in New Hampshire and made your way to Lawrence Academy. Wondering what led to that sort of gravitating down south, if you will, and what factor that played in your development as a player and maybe as a coach?
COACH PECKNOLD: Well, I went to Connecticut College, ended up there because Doug Roberts was the coach and he had played college hockey with my dad at Michigan State. Life is all about connections. Went to Lawrence Academy because a bunch of kids from the Manchester, New Hampshire, area had gone there. Like Kyle McDonough, I don't know if you remember that name in Vermont. So some of the things in life, it's just you gravitate to certain areas because it evolves that way.

And then when I got into coaching was really -- I mean, I never thought I was going to be a coach. And Doug Roberts, my coach, called me up after I was a year working, and he was like, you want to come back and help out? I was like, okay.

I was kind of floundering in life, didn't know what I wanted to do. Within a week I'm like this is what I want to do with my life. That's how I ended up at Connecticut College. Did that for three years and got lucky fell into Quinnipiac when it was a job nobody really wanted but I needed a job, and we've had some luck here along the way to get to where we are now.

Q. Just hearing this, when you first took over the job at Quinnipiac, what was your goal? I know it's a long time ago and things have changed and transpired, but what was that goal when you first started compared to where you are now?
COACH PECKNOLD: My first goal? Survival. We had midnight practices. I taught high school. I had to get up at 6:00 a.m. I would get home. By the time I got to bed, it was 3:00 a.m. Sleep 3:00 to 6:00, go teach my job, get home. The teaching job and Quinnipiac was 70 miles apart, if I remember that correctly. Then I would sleep 3:00 to 6:00 p.m., get up, go down, recruit, midnight practice.

That first year was tough. It was all survival. And I think I won one game. I think it was 1-12-1 after 14 games. I was like, what? What am I doing, for nothing? But I loved it. I knew we'd get better. In year two we brought in 19 freshmen, and we were off and running. My fifth year we went Division I.

But that was my main goal, was just survive. Survive that first year. And the second year we moved to 9:30 p.m. at night was practices, then my fifth year they finally made me full time.

Q. The style of play in the ECAC, the league has done well in recent years, but the type of games you play night in and night out, do you consider those good preparation for NCAA games, or are the styles a lot different between the two?
COACH PECKNOLD: I think ECAC play has really made us battle tested. I think our league is phenomenal. Cornell came in eighth place in our league this year, and they were 15th in the PairWise. That's a good league. That's a great league.

And we play a great non-conference. We played St. Cloud twice. We played a lot of good Hockey East teams. I think we're battle tested.

And a lot of that is stuff we have to deal with in the ECAC, great players, great coaches. The coaches are really good. I think we challenge each other and forced each other to be better. And you've seen really in the last five to six years really the ECAC evolve into one of the better leagues in the country.

Q. Rand, with only three losses, I imagine there were no soft spots in the schedule this year for you. But was there a point in the season where you said this team's got it, this is a team we can get to the Frozen Four with?
COACH PECKNOLD: Yeah, I never think that way. I don't think -- I don't get ahead of myself. Like certainly you're like I want to go to the Frozen Four, but it never happened until the Lowell game was over and now we're going.

One of the things I try to do as a coach with my players, and I believe in it, is we stay in the moment and we focus at the task at hand. When you walk in our locker room, you see on the door it says: Attack the day. We're going to attack the day. We're ready to go, and this is what we're doing today, it's Monday practice, Tuesday practice, whatever it is, and we just focus on the task at hand.

Certainly we have to -- if it's Tuesday and we're getting ready for St. Lawrence, we do certain things to get ready for the Friday game. But I think my players have been great with that this year. That's why we only have three losses in April. Like they're prepared. We don't get ahead of ourselves.

And probably also, too, we deal with adversity really well. Like we dealt with a lot of adversity in January and February. Number one team in the country, and like every game was like the Super Bowl for our opponent. They were fired up. Went on the road, played some tough ranks against teams that maybe were not having the best season, but this was their year. This was their Stanley Cup game. And we had to find a way to win a lot of games or come from behind to even get a tie in the third period.

It's a resilient group, and we're certainly proud of what we've accomplished so far, but we've still got a little work left to do here.

Q. You talked about 2009 how you guys changed some of your approach. I wonder, coming into this Frozen Four, having the experience from a few years ago, has that approach changed at all? What did you take away from that first Frozen Four and wanted to play maybe with the approach a little bit heading into this week?
COACH PECKNOLD: We haven't changed much since the '13 Frozen Four. I thought we played great that whole year. It was a great year. And the loss in the National Championship game, we played well. We really played well. We had a lot of great scoring chances, and Jeff Malcolm was the best player on the ice. He was, and that's great. That's part of hockey.

But we haven't changed much. I learned a lot as a committee member in '12 when it was here in Tampa about how everything is run, which helped me for then, and it obviously helps me now. But I don't think we need to change much. We're on the right path. With the record we have, why would we do any type of drastic changes?

Once in a while we need to tweak things. People have asked me about Lowell game. Like we literally put an entirely new forecheck in for that game, which is a little unorthodox for us. But Lowell plays a completely different game, the way they swarm in the D zone. And our guys are so coachable. And we didn't practice it, we just put it in. And they did it, and they were great. And we played one of our best games of the season.

But I think the norm for us is to stay the course, play to our identity, and we'll get rewarded.

MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach.

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